Every now and then we get lucky in Business Development. Normally, BD folks are out targeting new partners and seeking new opportunities to win business for their companies. This usually involves a lot of hard work to build a solution, bring it to market, market the solution, and then work with field and channel teams to win a joint customer(s). In this case, it worked in the opposite way where we first heard of AquaConnect after we had received a PO from USC!! It turns out AquaConnect is such a trusted advisor to USC that they were able to just spec Centrify into their deployment plan and helped USC implement it – all without ever calling for help from Centrify! In the meantime we have connected with the great team at AquaConnect and partnered with them at a number of other important customers. On to the great story of how we met 🙂

The Customer Problem

The USC Engineering Department wanted to continually improve learning for its 5,300 students, and providing anywhere, anytime access to Mac-based applications was a key objective. While students have access Unnto a state-of-the-art computing lab, business hours in the facility were restricted and scheduled classes further limited availability. This limited availability forced some students to license software for their personal machines, which proved very expensive. Putting expense aside, the requirements for the solution needed at USC were demanding, including:

The ability to handle a mixed hardware and mixed OS environment.

Providing access to Mac servers from both inside and outside the university network, from any location.

A BYOD system that would allow students to work from their own devices.

USC searched far and wide and did not find anything that remotely could provide all this functionality at a reasonable cost – until AquaConnect came along.

The Solution:

AquaConnect is the market leader in Mac Remote Desktop Services and the first company to create a Mac Terminal Server for OS X. AquaConnect offered USC an answer to their problems that included the Centrify solution combined with Aqua Connect’s Remote Desktop Services product (for this we are still thankful to our partner AquaConnect 🙂 ). By combining these two offerings with the University’s own scripts, USC was able to extend unified access management from Windows Active Directory across the university’s heterogeneous computing environment. That may sound like a lot of tech mumbo jumbo, but what it means is that USC is able to offer Mac or Windows users anywhere anytime access to Mac applications from their own devices. Enabling students to get easy access to the applications and computing environments they need is key to learning in the connected classroom. Almost as important is the impact this has on USC financially.

“USC views the Centrify project as an investment in our students, but it’s offered significant savings as well. The value to enabling BYOD in onclassroom alone is over $60,000.”

Michael Goay
Executive Director of IT for Viterbi Business Affairs, USC

We are hugely excited to have USC as a customer and hugely thankful to USC and to AquaConnect for their cooperation with us in deploying at USC and for their support in our ongoing partnership.

To hear more about this unique solution from AquaConnect and Centrify please watch this webinar

The Centrify Alliance Partner Program (CAPP) provides developers, cloud and mobile ISVs the ability to jointly develop integrated solutions leveraging Centrify’s leading Unified Identity Services to provide secure access to cloud and mobile apps for mutual customers. CAPP partners have access to Centrify training, licenses and publications; joint development and integration testing; sales and marketing resources; and a wealth of information via Centrify’s secure partner portal. For more information on the CAPP, see http://www.centrify.com/partners/saas-app-technology.asp.

Centrify CEO Tom Kemp, an industry expert in security and infrastructure software, discusses market and technology issues around the disruption occurring in the Identity and Access Management market due to the cloud, mobile and consumerization of IT trends occurring in today's IT environment.